Thursday, May 22, 2008

And I work to be the first to admit (blog) when I've been doing something wrong.

Well, wrong is probably too harsh a term. Let's say - inefficiently.

I've gone over how I'd spent all this time in article marketing and all these various things until I figured out that you had to go to where the buyers are - not the viewers or browsers. And that's my current study of eBay.

Also, you may have noticed that I said blog readers like to keep up to date, meaning they only read two or three posts back. As well, they like their blog posts short and sweet. This is as they are part of the social media bunch - people who are primarily there for the experience.

And I said that you don't market to social media - can't be done, in fact.

Once again - social media followers aren't particularly buyers. But -- they can be converted to such...

OK, what was I doing wrong?

Long blog posts.

Where should these go?

On your website - all keyword optimized to promote your product.

Is using a free blog service wrong - why don't you just host your own blog? Free blog services are great because they have unlimited bandwidth (well, let's say Google's Blogspot does...). So you can upload videos and such (oh - that's the workaround for MP3's: turn them into videos) and then play them on that blog's dime.

Hosting your own blog means you cover that bandwidth. Sure, like WordPress, you can install all sorts of custom plug-ins to make your life and the viewers' experience better -- but let's look over blogs for what they are: Promotion and potential lead generation.

That's the use of all social media from a marketing view - promotion and potential lead generation.

Simple.

You don't "market" to the social media. You promote (which is only a third of marketing, if that) through social media buy giving out interesting tidbits which excite people to come visit your blog, which is where you host more interesting tidbits. (We're talking breadcrumb promotion here, so stay tuned...)

Breadcrumb 1 - various postings on YouTube, Squidoo, etc. which point to your blog.

Breadcrumb 2 - additional social media givings on your blog, which only contains a short post and links to a single page on your website.

Breadcrumb 3 - that page is written in the language (short paragraphs and lots of engaging pictures and bulleted explanations) for social media people - expressing benefits from a certain product or affiliate link -- and

Breadcrumb 4 - your sales page or affiliate program

Now, when you get them to buy once, then the whole system of upselling and cross-selling and subscriber issues come into play. Then you convert them into life-time buyers of your products.

But you drop little interesting tidbits along the way to get your social media birds to come and visit all your various breadcrumbs - they then tell their flock about it and all their friends arrive... and you get a lot of buyers.

Why do you have so many breadcrumbs?

To build interest and pre-sell your buyers.

To qualify your buyers and strip out the mere viewers and lookie-loo's.

To save your personally paid-for bandwidth for the buyers and subscribers - where they return the favor.

It's taken me some time to sort all this out, since the hype is incredible, even from the professional hype-sters (who I've been twittering recently).

My mistake was using a blog to distill my research points - when it's best use blogs as socialmedia, meaning that it should be designed for viewerexperience, not hard-core and long-winded data.

So this is probably the last longish post you'll see from me.

What does this do for your writing?

Keep a private blog, or post via NVU to a subscriber-only section of your website. Then collect up those blog posts and make ebooks out of them, for giveaway or sales in return for email opt-in. Collect up those ebooks and you have an Amazon book (via Lulu) for additional sales.

Do some videos, slideshares, press releases, podcasts on how interesting this book is - and how mysterious its author and the secrets you reveal, etc. etc.

These then link to your blog post which summarizes all these and links to your single page (and all of the above have the same keywords and cross-link to each other)

That single page gives a media-rich explanation, or review, or some sort of neat data - but, again, is just a thriller intro: sizzle, not steak. But enough so they get the flavor of where you're going...

Then they click on the link to your sales page or affiliate link for the rest of the data - which is where you turn them into buyers.

With freebie (other peoples' bandwidth) you don't really get analytics out of them (unless you integrate something like Google Analytics on those pages, which is extra work).

BUT - when you get them onto your site, you can tell where they came from and where they go to exactly, so you'll know what social media promotion is working and what your conversion rate is, etc.

All from a few breadcrumbs off that loaf of bread which was supposed to be your lunch... but instead can be leveraged into others buying you several full-course meals.